Chiapas: 6 years after the Viejo Velsaco massacre, yet “another six-year term of impunity” (CDHFBC)

On 13 December 2012, the Fray Bartolome de Las Casas Center for Human Rights (CDHFBC) lamented that six years following the Viejo Velasco massacre, “the coherence of the government has a constant named impunity.” In a press-bulletin, the CDHFBC recalled that on 13 November 2006, a group of 40 persons from the Nueva Palestina community who were accompanied by 300 Sectorial police invaded Viejo Velasco (Ocosingo municipality), which is located on the border of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. The operation left six people dead and two disappeared; it forcibly displaced 20 men, 8 women, and 8 children who survived the attack. The CDHFBC stressed that the forced displacement of these 36 persons has continued to date, denouncing that they have been “criminalized, given that they [face] arrest-orders” and find themselves in a juridical limbo. Beyond that, the Center reports that two other persons continue to be disappeared.

In its communique, the CDHFBC indicated that as regards events such as the Viejo Velasco massacre, “the six-year term of the government that will end its term in a few days was nothing more than one of makeup and illusion; the governor of the state, Juan Jose Sabines Guerrero, indebted the state in exchange for selling the image that some governmental organizations have perpetuated regarding his ‘support of human rights,’ when the grave rights-violations which have occurred have been marked by the constant of impunity.”